If you’re looking for a comics blog to follow, “The Marvel Age of Comics” is a love letter to the golden age of comics by Marvel Executive Editor/Senior VP Tom Brevoort.

I don’t know Tom very well.  My last interaction with him involved a note being passed down from him to my Marvel Adventures editor that I’d misplaced the apostrophe in the name “Kl’rt” (the real name of the Fantastic Four’s “The Super-Skrull”). 

As embarrassed as I was that I’d been caught making a mistake by such a senior editor, I think it’s a testament to both Tom’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Marvel Universe and his attention to detail on every story that’s under his aegis.

You wouldn’t think that someone working that hard would have time to post original artwork from Marvel’s early days, let alone with a bit of commentary to accompany it.  But Tom’s been rolling with “The Marvel Age of Comics” for a while now, and it’s always a real treat for me to get a peek behind the scenes of the birth of the world’s greatest fictional universe.

Each pages tells two stories…the fictional one on the page (this was before comics were decompressed, and you could really tell a story on a page), and notes from Tom describing some aspect of its creation.

The above page is an X-Men page drawn by Jim Steranko, best known for his groundbreaking run on Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.  (Which you’ll see is a huge influence on my upcoming Kickstart book DECOY).  As an escape artist he inspired both Jack Kirby’s “Mister Miracle” and Josef “Joe” Kavalier/The Escapist in Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay (one of my all time favorite novles).

Wikipedia can tell you all that, here’s what Tom has to say about this particular page:

themarvelageofcomics:

Splash page to X-MEN #51 by Jim Steranko and John Tartaglione. Reportedly, Steranko was very unhappy with the inking job on this story and asked to have his credit removed, which is why the art is credited to DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU?

I love the design of above page - titles as architecture - classic Steranko.   But I love the idea of “DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU?” as comics version of the Alan Smithee credit even more. 

I may just steal it next time I’m not happy with how my work turned out.